


The Touch

by FrivolousSuits



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Angst, F/M, Heavily Soulmate-Inspired, M/M, References to drug addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 16:06:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14139588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrivolousSuits/pseuds/FrivolousSuits
Summary: Harvey Specter doubts he has the touch. He’s got a flair for reading people, but that’s the sort of non-magical power that comes from just being an intelligent observer.Then Rick Sorkin walks into a room at the Chilton Hotel, Harvey reaches out for a handshake, and it takes all his years of poker to bottle up his shock.





	The Touch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [statusquo_ergo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/gifts).



> Inspired by the Marvey Fic Challenge "on a molecular level" and by this [tweet from Aaron Korsh](https://twitter.com/akorsh9/status/959709631781027841). Written for the marvelous [statusquo_ergo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/works)!

They say people with the touch are destined to be together with the one they are most in touch with. Even as a kid, Harvey Specter doesn’t buy the fairy tale.

He doesn’t have the touch himself; at least he strongly doubts it. He’s got a flair for reading people, but that’s the sort of non-magical power that comes from just being an intelligent observer. Sure, he gets the occasional odd feeling when he touches something that’s not his– a sense of familiarity from his dad’s sheet music, a shadow of guilt when he hugs his mother, even though he’s done nothing wrong. Yet Harvey reasons that those feelings are just flashes of wishful thinking, not real magical impressions.

(His victories at poker are 100% natural talent, thank you very much.)

Decades later, Rick Sorkin walks into a room at the Chilton Hotel, Harvey reaches out for a handshake, and it takes all his years of poker to bottle up his shock.

It’s electric shock, this sudden burst of energy that scatters all of Harvey’s thoughts and leaves him raw. A new awareness pierces his nerves, and in an instant he knows this skinny kid on a molecular level. He knows this kid’s genius, his grit. He knows he’s vulnerable, and that there’s little weakness in those vulnerabilities, just an open, unquestionable, unconquerable goodness that crashes through Harvey’s core and echoes on the far shores of his mind.

He also knows that this kid is terrified, and that terror is for some reason not directed at Harvey, even though Harvey’s plenty frightening at all times and even more so in a job interview.

Oh.

There’s pot on the floor.

That might explain the terror.  


* * *

Donna’s been in touch with the entire world as long as she can recall.

When she doesn’t push herself, her abilities are shallow, but that doesn’t keep them from being useful; though she can rarely see into any one person’s soul, she picks up all sorts of recent, surface-level factoids. She can hit an elevator button and know the coffee order of the last person who touched it. She can put on a taxicab seatbelt and learn all about the last passenger’s tragic breakup. It’s an intoxicating overload of information, but she’s learned to filter and organize it. The impressions keep her life exciting, they help her give good advice, and they make her practically invincible.

Harvey Specter catches her eye, explicitly because she can’t get a single impression from him.

Soon after college, she’s auditioning for the part of a lawyer in an off-Broadway play, so she decides to do some research and head downtown to New York City’s actual Supreme Court. She soaks up details– ooh, that defendant’s not really guilty, he’s just covering for his boyfriend– and watches trials. When she gets bored of some financial case she switches courtrooms and waits for the ADA to walk in.

The unexpectedly handsome ADA.

He strides forward, opens the wooden door that holds back the audience, and continues to the judge for some petition or another. She decides to indulge and touch the top of the door– only to find out nothing. It’s a blank page, and the image of a stainless steel wall rises in her mind.

How interesting.

The fairy tales say people like her should end up with the people they’re most in touch with, but she’s never liked stories without a good twist. And this would be quite the twist, if fate is throwing her towards the one person she’s not in touch with at all.

She gets herself a job with him, and though it’s difficult working without her magic, she relishes the challenge. She strives to learn about Harvey, collecting facts about him until she can replicate her omniscience through mundane methods. He occasionally asks in oblique fashion whether she has the touch, and she always wriggles her way out of answering.

Louis Litt is the opposite of Harvey. His subconscious seems to bleed into everything in the office, his paranoia and insecurities seeping into the walls. It makes him entirely too easy to terrorize, but Donna exercises some restraint– the game’s no fun when one side’s just so much better.

She feels Mike Ross’s aura of paranoia the moment he walks up to her desk, but then he covers it with a slick line about ditching the police. He’s got guts, she’s sure of that, and that’s why she allows him into Harvey’s inner sanctum.

* * *

Donna watches Mike and Harvey and laughs at the kid’s hero worship. Harvey’s high on the admiration, as if his ego needed the boost, and Donna figures that’s why he keeps dropping by the bullpen to preen, and why he shows off for Mike at client meetings and trials. Though he calls Mike the puppy, Harvey’s acting like a young golden retriever– overenthusiastic, eager to please, utterly inseparable from his new chew toy– and Donna chuckles at them both and waits for the fascination to wear off.

It doesn’t.

Mike starts declaring independence, building his career, building a relationship with Rachel– and there’s plenty of passion there, it nearly knocked Donna over when she entered the file room the morning after– yet Harvey leans on Mike more and more. Harvey rarely says “no” to Mike. He threatens Jessica for Mike. He tries to go to jail for Mike, and when that fails he pulls more stunts than Donna can count to get Mike out. Once he’s out, Harvey rehires him, plays even more tricks to get him a law license, pays him more money than any other junior partner in the city– out of his own salary, Donna checked– and blithely gives up his own office to make Mike happy.

Donna doesn’t know how it happened, but seven years have gone by, seven years that Harvey has spent finding increasingly high cliffs to cast himself off of in order to save Mike Ross.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that, when Mike finally decides to leave, Harvey’s smiling wider than anyone else. He waives the non-compete, he uses a loophole in the bylaws to throw extra severance pay at the happy couple, he holds the metaphorical door open as Mike marches out.

That’s when it all goes to hell.

* * *

Everything Donna touches at the office screams “stress!” Which isn’t surprising, they’re an elite New York law firm after all, but for once the employees’ terror isn’t Louis-centric. Harvey’s the one at fault.

Though it’s only Wednesday, Harvey has already lashed out at Louis twice this week, raging at him for mistakes that he was admittedly about to make but hadn’t made yet. Then Harvey chewed out the associates working with him on a case, even though, in Donna’s opinion, he didn’t articulate his expectations clearly in the first place. When she tried to confront him about it, he gave her a lecture on ignoring her other duties and lacking “focus.”

Never mind that he’s the one who can’t focus. In the past six months since Mike left, his attention span has dwindled to approximately half an hour. Really, he can read or write or talk with clients for half an hour, and then he’s out of his office, running off to some other part of the firm where he’s not needed. He strolls through the bullpen and lingers, resting his hands on the ridges of the cubicles, and though he spends the time asking sensible, polite questions of the associates, how they’re handling their matters, how they feel the firm could improve, the associates nonetheless end up terrified. Other times, Harvey goes to the library, ignoring the new, up-to-date books and instead pulling editions from five or six years ago, bringing them back to in his office for no clear reason but to class the room up. He always returns from these excursions happy, and the energy always ebbs away again.

He offers up his office to Louis and moves back to the smaller room he had before, and that lengthens his attention span to a solid forty-five minutes. The change makes Donna feel better for days, before she realizes the only thing she’s seen him consume in weeks is coffee.

For the entirety of the next week he acts normal, and she feels confident enough to joke, “I haven’t seen that suit in years.”

“Louis keeps wearing suits he had tailored five years ago, so I joined in to make him feel better,” he deadpans.

The suit hangs loosely on Harvey’s frame, and suddenly Donna remembers it– Mike wore it, or rather he swam in it, that time with the bedbugs.

Harvey’s excursions get more mysterious with time. The bullpen ceases to hold its strange fascination, and he heads to more obscure corners of the firm and the buildings surrounding it.

“Where’s Harvey?” Alex demands late one night, storming into Donna’s office. “I need his sign-off by midnight, and he’s not picking up.”

She sighs and calls down to security to confirm that he hasn’t left the building yet. Then she goes looking in the library and the bullpen, in Louis’s office and the bathroom, on the rooftop, but to no avail.

“Where do people go to hide?” she mutters to herself. The answer arrives at once, but she snorts– there’s no way.

She pushes open the file room door, and Harvey’s looking back at her. He’s standing between two shelves, his hands folded around a metal ledge. She walks up to him and leans against a shelf.

“What are you doing?” she says, mildly as she can.

“I had a free moment, so I decided to finally read Clark v. Kent.”

Donna stares him down, and Jesus, it’s not dark enough for his pupils to be that wide. “You don’t have a free moment.”

“No?”

“Alex has been looking for you.” Her eyes flit down for a second. “Also, I really doubt Clark v. Kent is _that_ interesting.”

He rolls his eyes and then brushes past her, heading back out. She hears him sniff.

* * *

It all comes to a head when she spots the deed of an apartment on Harvey’s desk– not Harvey’s own apartment, but the one Mike and Rachel sold, still furnished, before they moved away.

The deed has Harvey’s name on it.

Harvey walks into his office with an excessively large coffee cup. “Can I help you?”

“Why did you buy their apartment?”

“So Mike has a place to stay when he and Rachel break up,” he retorts. Then he freezes, there’s panic there, and he’s too damn tired to cover it properly.

“What is going on with you?”

A second later he proceeds to his desk, shrugging. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The most obvious explanation is that he’s snapped from the pressure and turned to drugs. Giving the sniffling cocaine’s likely, it’s always been an intoxicant of choice in their circles, but there are other possible culprits, and goddammit, Donna needs to know so she can fix this mess. For one crazy moment she thinks of just grabbing him and kissing him.

She runs that thought through her head again, and it’s not the worst idea.

Kissing, lips to lips, has always been the purest form of the touch. If Donna was ever to have a chance of breaking through Harvey’s steel walls it would be by kissing. It didn’t work when she kissed him years before, but she wasn’t as experienced then, she wasn’t as determined to know his mind. Then, she didn’t have to know.

Now she does.

He’s turned away from her, fidgeting– just another thing that’s changed, because Harvey Specter shouldn’t ever fidget. He’s turned his back to her and reached out to fiddle with the globe on the shelves behind his desk. It wasn’t there before, but Mike brought it in and Harvey kept it, even though it goes against his whole minimalist style.

Oh.

There’s more than one type of addiction in this world.

She has to know, but she’s got one more test to run before she pulls out the big guns. She murmurs an apology and excuses herself to a new task.

* * *

Donna calls Rachel, who sounds exhausted even though she’s far away from the Specter Litt chaos. Donna tries to cheer her up, but her main goal is to get information– specifically, the name of the Catholic school Mike attended. After that, Donna contacts Father Walker and introduces herself as a potential donor interested in touring the school, and they arrange a time for her to come by.

It’s difficult for her.

No two people with the touch feel impressions the same way, and to Donna children leave deeper impressions than adults. Moving through the school halls, she feels their vibrant human essence, their hopes and dreams. It’s a sort of electricity she only finds at concerts or live theater otherwise. It stirs up the depths of her magic.

She walks the halls in deep concentration, summoning up all her power until she’s thrumming with it, and casts around for some trace of Mike. She can’t find him, not until she reaches the library.

Of course, there’s a bookcase there that feels like Mike. She closes her eyes and runs a finger down the spines of the books until she finds something that calls out, sings out with a lifetime of joy and pain and love.

 _Curious George_.

* * *

She donates a thousand dollars in exchange for the one book. Folding her arms around it, she trudges back to the car as the magic dissipates, leaving her empty and melancholy.

She sinks back against the driver’s seat, sighing. There’s a reason she doesn’t often indulge in the full extent of her magic– when the flurry of impressions is drained and gone withdrawal hits. Symptoms of severe withdrawal from the touch include fatigue, loss of focus, insomnia, lack of appetite, mood swings, and a desperate need to reclaim the old high.

There are tears pricking at her eyes, but she takes a steadying breath and starts the ignition, busying herself with thoughts of wrapping paper.

* * *

Harvey’s been coming in to the office at 5:30 am, earlier than even the most devoted associates. A few weeks later, Donna meets him there, a smile on her face, wrapped gift in hand. “Happy early birthday. I know I could give it tomorrow, but I’m hoping to get out of here before twelve on a Friday night.”

He takes a look at the thin, flat rectangle and raises an eyebrow. “What is this?”

“Don’t judge it until you open it,” she teases. “Go ahead.”

He sits down with the gift in front of him and starts to pull apart the wrapping. When he exposes the sunshine yellow, he snorts. “I appreciate the thought, but why–”

As soon as he touches the cover, his eyes fill with tears. His mouth falls shut, and he swallows hard, and he looks down at the book and back up at her, chest heaving. “What the hell did you do?”

“No,” Donna snaps, finally breaking under months of pressure, “what did _you_ do, Harvey? How did you let Mike go?”

“What do you mean?” He looks at her, bewildered. “How could I _not_ let Mike go?”

“You’ve been out of your mind,” she spits. “Louis is at his wit’s end dealing with you, _I’m_ at my wit’s end. Do you know how worried we’ve been?”

“I was managing it–”

“No, Harvey, you haven’t even been close to managing it. You didn’t even tell _him_ , did you?” One look convinces her she’s right. “Look, Mike’s a good person, he worships the ground you walk on. If you just had told him, he would have turned down the job. He would have stayed in New York. And the only reason I can think of that you wouldn’t tell him is if you were actually in lo–”

Oh.

He’s staring up at her with lost brown eyes, both hands clinging to the book to ground him, and she just nods and leaves.

So this is how a fairy tale dies.

It’s surprisingly easy to let go of the fantasies about herself and Harvey. Maybe she really is meant to be with the person she’s most in touch with, not the one she’s least in touch with.

Still, before she can start thinking about Louis Litt, she has to do one more thing.

* * *

“You should fly out to New York for a birthday surprise,” she announces over the phone. “I’ve already purchased a first-class seat on a red-eye.”

She picks Mike up at JFK at three in the morning and thanks him for coming, and when she lifts his suitcase into the car all sorts of revelations hit, most importantly that he and Rachel were in a screaming match when he was packing it. She doesn’t press him for details, just letting him doze as she drives.

When they make it to Harvey’s apartment, Donna gets them upstairs and unlocks the door. As they walk in, she warns him not to freak out.

“What would I freak out over?”

She flicks on the light.

The entire place is stuffed with Mike’s old belongings. The plush cream couch he shared with Rachel sits in the center of the room, even though it clashes with the rest of the furniture. The white curtains from his old apartment hang from the windows, despite being too short to reach the floor, and his old bike lock sits by a fancy vase on a side table, and–

“He put the panda on his fridge?” Mike blurts out before Donna shushes him.

“Let him sleep. It’s been a while since he has.”

“But–” Mike says, lowering his voice– “why does he have all this stuff? Harvey is many things, but he’s not a hoarder.”

“Unless he feels like he has no choice.”

He looks at her, confused, but he’s always been good at solving puzzles. She can see when the pieces start falling into place.

“Good night, Mike.”

* * *

Harvey wakes the next morning in his guest room, sitting up and stretching out his arms. The sheets really are rough, as Mike complained, and he would return to his own bed if he could only sleep in it for more than an hour at a time.

For the first time since “it” happened, he feels like today might be a good day. He dismisses the happiness as birthday sentimentality until he walks into his main room and finds an intruder, sitting and eating cereal at the kitchen counter.

“What are you–” he cuts off his own question. “Donna.”

Mike puts down the spoon and swings his legs around to face him. “Why didn’t you tell me, Harvey?”

His voice is quiet and non-judgemental, and there’s no more room for lies.

“You would have stayed.”

“Obviously.”

“Look–” Harvey sighs– “I’m handling it.”

Mike takes a pointed look around the apartment.

“Okay,” he amends, “maybe I’m not handling it. But–” he advances towards Mike– “while I apparently need you on a molecular level, you don’t have to physically be here if you don’t want. If you mail me things every once in a while, I can make that work.”

“If I mail you ‘things’?” Mike repeats in disbelief.

“Just things you carry. Pens, pencils. Keyboard keys. Not that you I want you to dismantle your computer, but I did find your old keyboard in the bullpen helpful–”

“Or I could just come back here,” he interrupts.

“What’s here for you?” Harvey challenges, growing louder. “Look, Mike, I can’t promise you the typical fairy tale. You’re with Rachel, I’m not expecting you to fall in love with me and live happily ever after.”

“I’m done with Rachel,” Mike says, his voice still soft. “So I don’t know about you, but I’d like to give this happy ever after its fair shot.”

Harvey knows Mike Ross’s genius, his values, his entire being, but somehow he missed the part where Mike’s into guys.

Into _him_ , going by the shifting spark in his eyes right now.

So he steps forward and reaches out with a trembling hand and places his palm on Mike’s shoulder. It’s just a shirt Mike threw on yesterday, but it’s been so very long that Harvey can’t stop the little gasp from slipping out.

That’s nothing compared to the magic when Mike leans in and kisses him.

**Author's Note:**

> There really are files in the file room about [Clark v. Kent](https://www.cinemablend.com/television/Suits-Set-Visit-Part-1-Trip-Toronto-Set-USA-Legal-Drama-43455.html).


End file.
